Thursday, May 21, 2009

Stimulus Dollars Assigned to the South Suburbs

In a prior post, I noted the project requests from the South Suburbs in Cook County. I wrote:

Mayors in Illinois made a request totalling $3 billion, representing all the requests in the state listed in the report. But the villages of County Club Hills, Dolton, Flossmoor, Hazel Crest, Markham, Robbins or Steger were absent from these requests.

Now we get our first indications of where recovery money is actually going in the South Suburbs. Recovery.org is using federal contracts to track recovery dollars, and found these IDOT projects funded for the South Suburbs:

According to the site, there have been 81 projects funded in Cook County valued at $318,260,019.00 of recovery dollars. Of these, there are 9 projects (or 11%) valued at $39,865,000 (or 12.5%), generating 517 jobs in South Suburbs (and Chicago in related projects).

Again, we find that the villages of County Club Hills, Flossmoor and Hazel Crest are absent from these projects. As we learned during the campaign, this was deliberate on the part of the outgoing mayor of Flossmoor. Even if the need exists (which it does), the defeated mayor choose not to focus on stimulus money, believing instead that Flossmoor would benefit more by his long-time interest in the blighted TIF district he declared on Volmer Rd. Of course, those lots have been vacant for years (much of it more than 10 years) and no one believes that large tracts of land will be developed in the midst of the worst recession since World War 2.

Which may be why Flossmoor voters soundly rejected his candidacy.

Otoh, the H-F school district not only chased -- but has received -- stimulus money to help fund building on the H-F High School campus:

There's a lot of irony to these desperate results given the fact that the mayor rudely lectured the superintendent after the community rose up against the outgoing mayor's request to sell alcohol at retail across the street from H-F High. For context, it is appropriate to note that no retail outlet in Flossmoor currently sells packaged liquor. The outgoing mayor sought to make the location across from the high school the first in the village -- something that residents didn't take too kindly to...